Remember the Lion for Liesel? This card is for her brother Heinrich.

These cards are a little different from my usual. I have a Precious Moments Alphabet book from the early 90s that has a cute image to go along with each letter. H is a “gender neutral” pattern with a hippo, the H is either in blue or pink depending on the sex of the person receiving it.

Unlike many of the cross stitches I have worked on so far this year, this one required something called backstitching. I like to call it outlining as this makes more sense to most people.

Backstitching is done when you need more details in your pattern. As you can see this cross stitch looks a bit funny without any lines around the edges and even on the inside of the patter to bring out the details. It’s very 2 dimensional and not very clear without the details added.

Once the backstitching was completed It was time to add the interfacing to the back in hopes of keeping everything straight.

I wanted to keep this card similar to Liesel’s and went with a blue paper for frame and blue glitter glue to finish it off. The blue paper I used is a bit on the thin side, almost like regular printer paper and less like a cardstock. It was from my collection of paper traditionally for scrapbooking. Because it was thinner and lighter I think that is why I had so much trouble with mounting anything well.

The cross stitch pulled up and to the right, not sure how it ended up stretch like that, but with the interfacing on it there’s not much to be done. I placed it in the frame as best I could and attempted to adhere it to the cardstock. This is when things really went wrong and the paper ended up bubbling creating the creases you see along the top and bottom corners on the right. These flaws make this a hand made project for sure.

Stitching

Started: March 22nd
Finished: March 31st

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